Bell nonlocality

Bell's 1964 theorem, which states that the predictions of quantum theory cannot be accounted for by any local theory, represents one of the most profound developments in the foundations of physics. In the last two decades, Bell's theorem has been a central theme of research from a variety of perspectives, mainly motivated by quantum information science, where the nonlocality of quantum theory underpins many of the advantages afforded by a quantum processing of information. The focus of this review is to a large extent oriented by these later developments. We review the main concepts and tools which have been developed to describe and study the nonlocality of quantum theory, and which have raised this topic to the status of a full sub-field of quantum information science.Comment: 65 pages, 7 figures. Final versio

Cecil Rhodes distorted politics in South Africa long before apartheid

Cecil Rhodes’ policy reforms disenfranchised up to 15,000 mostly black and mixed-race voters in South Africa. This voter suppression created an unequal political environment that favoured white men 50 years before apartheid, write Daniel de Kadt and Joachim Wehner

Improving the Resilience of Existing Housing to Severe Wind Events: annual project report 2014-2015

Damage investigations carried out by the Cyclone Testing Station (CTS) following severe wind storms have typically shown that Australian houses built prior to the mid-1980s do not offer the same level of performance and protection during windstorms as houses constructed to contemporary building standards. Given that these older houses will represent the bulk of the housing stock for many decades, practical structural upgrading solutions based on the latest research will make a significant improvement to housing performance and to the economic and social well-being of the community. Structural retrofitting details exist for some forms of legacy housing but the uptake of these details is limited. There is also evidence that retrofitting details are not being included into houses requiring major repairs following severe storm events, thus missing the ideal opportunity to improve resilience of the house and community. Hence, the issues of retrofitting legacy housing, including feasibility and hindrances on take-up, etc., must be analysed. The primary objective of this research is to develop cost-effective strategies for mitigating damage to housing from severe windstorms across Australia. These evidence-based strategies will be (a) tailored to aid policy formulation and decision making in government and industry, and (b) provide guidelines detailing various options and benefits to homeowners and the building community for retrofitting typical at-risk houses in Australian communities

Improving the Resilience of Existing Housing to Severe Wind Events: annual project report 2014-2015

Damage investigations carried out by the Cyclone Testing Station (CTS) following severe wind storms have typically shown that Australian houses built prior to the mid-1980s do not offer the same level of performance and protection during windstorms as houses constructed to contemporary building standards. Given that these older houses will represent the bulk of the housing stock for many decades, practical structural upgrading solutions based on the latest research will make a significant improvement to housing performance and to the economic and social well-being of the community. Structural retrofitting details exist for some forms of legacy housing but the uptake of these details is limited. There is also evidence that retrofitting details are not being included into houses requiring major repairs following severe storm events, thus missing the ideal opportunity to improve resilience of the house and community. Hence, the issues of retrofitting legacy housing, including feasibility and hindrances on take-up, etc., must be analysed. The primary objective of this research is to develop cost-effective strategies for mitigating damage to housing from severe windstorms across Australia. These evidence-based strategies will be (a) tailored to aid policy formulation and decision making in government and industry, and (b) provide guidelines detailing various options and benefits to homeowners and the building community for retrofitting typical at-risk houses in Australian communities

BPM ADOPTION IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED COMPANIES IN BAVARIA

Small and medium sized (SMEs) companies are a pillar of the Bavarian economy. With business process management (BPM) providing an important competitive advantage in the globalized economy, the adap-tion of BPM by SMEs has societal relevance. However, the reasons why, or why not, SMEs implement BPM measures are still not fully understood. Previous research addressed this topic either breadthwise as surveys or in depth as case studies, and thus only has a limited perspective. Therefore, in our work, we carry out a mixed method analysis. We conduct 10 case studies to analyse the current state of adoption as well as the reasons for or against implementing further BPM measures. The insights gained guide the design of the subsequent survey. 114 results allow us to evaluate how widespread a particular reason may be. Lastly, the combined discussion of the results of both the case studies and surveys allow us to identify reasons that hinder or foster BPM adoption in SMEs, which are in-depth as well as generalizable. The study results are analyzed to derive propositions to research and practitioners alike that support SMEs to introduce further measures of BPM and improve their global competitiveness. For example, we could identify that BPM is in some cases enforced by customers, that stricter certifications are nec-essary, and that BPM trainings aligned to the needs of SMEs are desirable

Phonological and semantic influences on auditory word perception in children with and without reading impairments using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-135).Children with dyslexia struggle with learning to read despite adequate intelligence, motivation, and schooling. Over the years, there has been a growing consensus about the role of phonological processing in reading disability. Poor readers typically do worse than their normal reading peers on tasks that require phonological processing which has been linked, directly or indirectly, to their speech perception abilities. The work in this thesis combined behavioral, MEG, and EEG methods to examine how normal and reading-impaired children, 7-13 years of age, perceive speech under varying degrees of phonological contrast (1 vs. 3 phonetic features). In a series of auditory word perception experiments, good and poor readers were found to do worse in accuracy and/or reaction times in phonologically similar (i.e., 1-feature contrast) than phonologically dissimilar (i.e., 2 or 3-feature contrast) conditions. Despite the similar behavioral performance and EEG responses for the two groups, a region of interest (ROI) based MEG approach revealed differences in the brain activation of the two groups in superior temporal regions at 140 to 300 ms.(cont.) In the auditory word discrimination task, differences in activation were found in good readers but not poor readers, as a function of the degree of phonological contrast, reflecting poor readers' lack of sensitivity to the phonological characteristics of the word stimuli. In the sentence plausibility judgment task, the impaired phonological processing abilities of the poor readers may have led them to rely more on top-down sentence context to perceptually disambiguate phonologically confusing terminal words, thereby deceiving them into accepting the phonologically similar incongruent sentences as being congruent. This may account for the poor reader group's reduced brain activation in the phonologically demanding condition in the sentence task. The results of the experiments are consistent with a phonological view of reading disability according to which children with reading impairments have poorly defined phonological representations.by Daniel T. Wehner.Ph.D

The D153del mutation in GNB3 gene causes tissue specific signalling patterns and an abnormal renal morphology in rge chickens

Background The GNB3 gene is expressed in cone but not rod photoreceptors of vertebrates, where it acts as the β transducin subunit in the colour visual transduction process. A naturally occurring mutation ‘D153del’ in the GNB3 gene causes the recessively inherited blinding phenotype retinopathy globe enlarged (rge) disease in chickens. GNB3 is however also expressed in most other vertebrate tissues suggesting that the D153del mutation may exert pathological effects that outlie from eye. Principal Findings Recombinant studies in COS-7 cells that were transfected with normal and mutant recombinant GNB3 constructs and subjected to cycloheximide chase showed that the mutant GNB3d protein had a much shorter half life compared to normal GNB3. GNB3 codes for the Gβ3 protein subunit that, together with different Gγ and Gα subunits, activates and regulates phosphorylation cascades in different tissues. As expected, the relative levels of cGMP and cAMP secondary messengers and their activated kinases such as MAPK, AKT and GRK2 were also found to be altered significantly in a tissue specific manner in rge chickens. Histochemical analysis on kidney tissue sections, from rge homozygous affected chickens, showed the chickens had enlargement of the glomerular capsule, causing glomerulomegaly and tubulointerstitial inflammation whereas other tissues (brain, heart, liver, pancreas) were unaffected. Significance These findings confirm that the D153del mutation in GNB3 gene targets GNB3 protein to early degradation. Lack of GNB3 signalling causes reduced phosphorylation activity of ERK2 and AKT leading to severe pathological phenotypes such as blindness and renal abnormalities in rge chickens

Strategien südamerikanischer Sekundärmächte

Der Amerikagipfel in Cartagena (Kolumbien) am 14./15. April 2012 endete ohne Abschlusserklärung. Tiefgreifende Meinungsverschiedenheiten über die Ausgrenzung Kubas und die Malvinasfrage legen den Schluss nahe, dass regionalpolitische Fragen künftig andernorts entschieden werden: in Südamerika. Der globale Aufstieg der Regionalmacht Brasilien ist in aller Munde. Argentinien, Chile, Venezuela und Kolumbien erfahren dagegen weitaus weniger Aufmerksamkeit. Gemessen an ihren materiellen Ressourcen und ihrem außenpolitischen Einfluss gelten sie als regionale Sekundärmächte. In Reaktion auf die zunehmend dominante Rolle Brasiliens haben diese vier Staaten unterschiedliche außenpolitische Strategien entwickelt. Alle vier Sekundärmächte gehen Koalitionen mit externen Mächten ein, um sektorspezifische Interessen (Handel, Rüstung, Technologie) zu verfolgen. Zudem dienen die Bündnisse mit den USA, China oder Russland dazu, den außenpolitischen Manövrierraum gegenüber der Regionalmacht auszubauen. Während Argentinien das Verhältnis zu Brasilien als eine 'kompetitive Partnerschaft' versteht, führt Venezuela mit der Bolivarischen Allianz für die Völker unseres Amerika (ALBA) ein alternatives Regionalforum an, in dem mit Bolivien und Ecuador zwei weitere südamerikanische Staaten vertreten sind. Dabei setzen Caracas und Buenos Aires auf anti-neoliberale Diskurse und auf eine protektionistische Wirtschaftspolitik gegenüber Brasilien. In beiden Ländern wird die Außenwirtschaftspolitik stark an der jeweiligen Wählerklientel ausgerichtet. Die Sekundärmächte Chile und Kolumbien zielen dagegen auf eine Liberalisierung des Außenhandels mit der Regionalmacht. In diesen gegenüber Brasilien wettbewerbsfähigsten Volkswirtschaften Südamerikas üben Unternehmerverbände nachhaltigen Einfluss auf die Außenpolitik aus. Santiago ergänzt den traditionellen Handelsbilateralismus und errichtet mit der Pazifik-Allianz gemeinsam mit Bogotá eine wirtschaftliche Gegenmacht mit erheblichem Potenzial: Der gemeinsame Binnenmarkt ist größer als der Brasiliens